Gateway by Frederik Pohl - Review by Nicholas Whyte

This is the twentieth in a series of reviews of those pieces of written science fiction and fantasy which have won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Gateway won the two awards made for Best Novel in 1978, and also unusually won the John W. Campbell Award as well. I haven't heard of a single one of the other Nebula shortlisted novels; the Hugo shortlist also included good (but IMHO inferior) works by Niven/Pournelle and George R.R. Martin; and the Campbell jury voted for Gateway ahead of two novels which surely would now be rated as classics, Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers and A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick. Two shorter stories also won the Hugo/Nebula double in 1978, "Stardance" by Spider and Jeanne Robinson and "Jeffty is Five" by Harlan Ellison. [Thanks to Robert Woodward for helping me sort out my Hugos and Nebulas.] Gateway is about the adventures and loves of Robinette Broadhead on the eponymous asteroid, a claustrophobic community of prospectors desperately gambling on the winnings they might make from one of the hundreds of alien spaceships abandoned there. It is certainly one of Pohl's best books out of a long and distinguished career, where his influence as editor and fan has probably been as great as his influence as a writer. It was written between his other two great novels, Man Plus and Jem, and about the same time as the one Pohl book that should be read by anyone interested in the history of science fiction, his autobiography, The Way the Future Was.
The novel manages to weave three quite different strands of plot together. The main plot, Robinette's reminiscences of what happened on Gateway, is told as a series of flashbacks between his much later sessions with the robot analyst he dubs Sigfrid von Shrink. But the third and most interesting strand is the insertion of single pages of text which are on first sight tangential to the story: output code from Sigfrid von Shrink's programming, lectures on the mysterious vanished Heechee, official publications of the Gateway Corporation, and, most evocative of all, the small ads placed by the Gateway prospectors. It allows the author to show his world from a different viewpoint than that of the narrator, which becomes reassuring later in the book as we gradually realize that he is not an entirely reliable witness.
As a Belfast teenager attending a convent school twenty years ago (albeit a liberal and broad-minded convent school - heck, it even took us boys as well as girls) my exposure to same-sex relationships had basically been restricted to media coverage of the Jeremy Thorpe trial. Gateway was probably the first book I read with a positive and unembarrassed portrayal of homosexuality -almost the first explicit mention of the topic is in a small ad from a lesbian couple looking for a partner for "permanent trimarriage" with the ultimate object of settling in, of all places, Northern Ireland. Robinette's failure to deal honestly with his own (limited) homosexual tendencies is clearly shown as one of his (many) negative characteristics. It's a striking contrast with the utterly inept treatment of the topic in Haldeman's The Forever War.
Great science fiction makes you sit back and think about your own world - in Brian Aldiss' phrase, "Not 'What if...?' but 'My God! What if...?'" Gateway achieves this effect for me in the sensawunda of exploring the Heechee artifacts, and even more so in its vivid and believable portrayal of life on the asteroid, and the backdrop of the desperate, overpopulated future solar system. A favourite line of mine, from Robinette's account of his early life in Wyoming: "Funny. In the old days oil used to bubble right out of the ground! And all people thought to do with it was stick it in their automobiles and burn it up." I guess that the portrayal of the horrors of getting decent medical insurance is also in this category, at least for American readers. The brutal exploitative economics of spaceflight seem all too realistic (and must have been a bit of a bucket of cold water on the sf of the time).
As for Gateway itself: though the prospectors' economic activity is very tightly regulated, one gets the impression that Gateway is a more sexually liberated place than the rest of the solar system. In fact, it's slightly reminiscent of a university campus: the prospectors get there only after a long journey, have to go to lectures, and hope to spend only a year or two there before they "graduate". There are very few children, and lots of drinking, dope and sex. But of course there is a perpetual edge of dicing with death. Robinette's lovers on Gateway, like him, all face deadly danger: Sheri comes back from her first trip damaged but alive and rich; Louise metaphorically sold her own body and literally sold her son's to get to Gateway; and the last three, Susie, who turns out to resemble Robinette's mother, Dane, with the "warm and welcome circle of his arm", and of course Klara, the grand love of his life, are all abandoned in the final chapter, "going down" into the black hole.
Of course, the whole Big Dumb Object genre, including Ringworldand Rendezvous with Rama, seems somewhat post-Apollo now, and I rank the novel as "very good" rather than "superb". Other aspects of the story have dated too. These days the Gateway Corporation would have an immense marketing budget, with fan magazines, internet newsgroups, frequent TV documentaries being made by the most obscure countries, and also exposés by political opponents of the government in the five major shareholders (one or two of which may be democracies). The typewriter-style font in which the Corporation documents are presented now looks unprofessional rather than official. It's a bit surprising, two years before Alien, and especially given Pohl's own political activities, that the politics of the relationship between prospectors and Corporation is barely explored (there is one small ad for a "mass meeting" to demand "prospector representation" but we hear no more of it and presume that nothing happened). The environmental concerns, though less fashionable perhaps, are still with us. (Of course, he was saving the politics for Jem.)
Pohl is frank about his own mental health problems in The Way the Future Was, and the sessions with Sigfrid von Shrink are clearly based on real experience of therapy. Clearly, because in fact taken on their own they are not that interesting; reading about someone else's therapy sessions is probably about as exciting as hearing about someone else's dream, or perhaps reading the transcript of a legal hearing or a dull parliamentary debate. But the Sigfrid sections also raise the question of man/machine relations which (if I remember correctly) Pohl then pursues to a greater extent in the later books of the series. The idea that a computer could be used for therapy doesn't seem so absurd at first glance; a character in David Lodge's 1985 (non-sf) novel Small World comes to grief by having deep psychological conversations with the famous ELIZA (or one of her close relatives).
The insertion of pages of Sigfrid's output near the start of the novel remind us that he is in fact a computer, not a person, and that Robinette's treatment of him as a human being who can be dominated or controlled is misguided - so when Robinette manages to get hold of the override command we, but not he, are prepared for his disappointment when it doesn't in fact change their relationship very much. In the very last chapter, though, after Robinette has begun, painfully, to come to terms with his past, Sigfrid throws a new light on the question in the rather poignant final words of the book: "You asked me, 'Do I call this living?' And I answer: Yes. It is exactly what I call living. And in my best hypothetical sense, I envy it very much."Other Reviews: Compared to the dozens of reviews for American Gods I found mercifully few on-line for Gateway (though rather more for the Frederik Pohl's Gateway computer game). Positive write-ups from Paul Johnson, Paul S. Jenkins, Kenneth Newquist, Steve Troy, TC, Mark Wightman, Aaron Hughes, and "Max"; less enthusiastic from Conan Tigerd, Monika Hübner and Sebastian Ritze (these last two in German).
The next review in this series will be of Charles Sheffield's novelette, "Georgia On My Mind".

PS added 18 January 2004: Thanks to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction I have suddenly realised the origin of the protagonist's name, Robinette. From the entry on Stephen Robinett: "Stargate (1974 ASF as by Tak Hallus; 1976) intriguingly combines hard sf and detective modes in the tale of two great corporations and their quarrel over the eponymous matter transmitter. Along with Frederik Pohl's Gateway (1977), this novel was important in establishing the commercial stargate (which can be variously defined as a matter-transmission aperture or as a discontinuity or as a wormhole extension of a singularity -- so long as the phenomenon allows profitable and instantaneous contact to be made between one part of the Universe and another) as an essential instrument of modern sf." So it looks as if Pohl's more memorable novel at least immortalised the author of Stargate. ​

Gateway won the 1977 Nebula Award for Best Novel

Other novels shortlisted for Nebula: In the Ocean of Night, by Gregory Benford; Cirque, by Terry Carr; Moonstar Odyssey, by David Gerrold; and Sword of the Demon, by Richard A. Lupoff. Other winners of 1977 Nebulas: "Stardance" (novella) by Spider and Jeanne Robinson; "The Screwfly Solution" (novelette) by James Tiptree jr; "Jeffty is Five" (short story) by Harlan Ellison. Gateway won the 1978 Hugo Award for Best Novel

Other 1978 nominees for Best Novel: The Forbidden Tower, by Marion Zimmer Bradley; Lucifer's Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle; Time Storm, by Gordon R. Dickson; and Dying of the Light, by George R. R. Martin. Other winners of 1978 Hugos: "Stardance" (novella) by Spider and Jeanne Robinson; "Eyes of Amber" (novelette) by Joan D. Vinge; "Jeffty is Five" by Harlan Ellison. Other awards

Won the 1978 John W. Campbell Award for Best Novel.

Won the 1978 Locus Award for Best Novel.

Won the 1979 Prix Apollo (for the French translation, La Grande Porte).

Nominated for 1978 Ditmar Award for Best International Long Fiction (beaten by The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien)

8th Place in 1987 Locus Award for Best All-Time Science Fiction Novel (beaten by Dune)

11th Place in 1998 Locus Award for All-Time Best Science Fiction Novel before 1990 [sic] (beaten by Dune)